


Do You Love Me?

by Mephistophelia



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: A Shameless Fiddler On The Roof Ripoff And What Of It, Brief Cameo By R's Dog, Domestic Fluff, E Is Trying So Hard, Feels, Grantaire Has Self-Esteem Issues, Idiots in Love, Just The Fluffiest Gosh-Darn Thing, M/M, Modern Era, Pillow Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-29 20:56:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19838365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mephistophelia/pseuds/Mephistophelia
Summary: It's hot. Really, really hot. Too hot for Grantaire to even try to sleep. Naturally, he decides now is the perfect time to confront Enjolras about his feelings.Enjolras is not entirely on board.





	Do You Love Me?

**Author's Note:**

> Hey friends!
> 
> Here's a little cottonball of fluff I wrote ages ago... I don't usually write Modern AU for these boys, but I thought I'd give it a shot.
> 
> (Also, I'll take any excuse to make gratuitous Fiddler on the Roof references.)
> 
> Drop me a note or a kudo if you like it!

It was hot.

Hot as shit, to put it poetically.

Grantaire had opened the window before they'd gone to bed, but it hadn't done them any good. From three floors below, city sounds wafted into the room, borne inside by the ripple of the cheap white curtains. Traffic. The rumble of voices from the sidewalk. Now and again the screech of an ambulance tearing down the Rue de Bac toward Pitié-Saltpêtrière. The heat seemed to make the sounds travel farther and more clearly, as though the heavy air were dense with the life of Paris.

The curtains were moving, but if there was a breeze, it was deliberately avoiding Grantaire. He sighed and turned over, the sheets tangled in his legs, hair sweat-plastered to his forehead. In the morning, he solemnly promised to God, he would buy a window AC unit. Until then, he would lie here and pretend the summer heat wasn't crushing his lungs.

Beside him, Enjolras slept. Cool as you please in boxers and a gray tee-shirt, not a drop of sweat on him. How he did it, Grantaire would never understand. It was like sharing a bed with half of Michelangelo's Pietà.

On the end table, the glowing numbers on the clock switched from 3:13 to 3:14 in the morning. Enjolras' alarm would go off in just under three hours, pulling him out of bed and back on the metro to the courtroom, where his latest trial would begin at nine. And Grantaire would still be here. Tired. Miserable. Alone.

And hot.

He turned over again. Then, twenty seconds later, again. Blew out a long breath that ruffled the damp hair on his forehead.

Lying on his back, he heard his own voice loud and jarring through the dark.

"Apollo?"

Enjolras said nothing. He did not move, but his breathing had hitched at the sound, and was now artificially regular. He was awake, all right. But he was doing his damnedest to pretend not to be.

Well, that simply would not do. If Grantaire had to be awake through this hell, he wasn't about to do it alone.

"Apollo," Grantaire said, louder this time.

Enjolras' sigh sounded like an overworked and exasperated god. He did not open his eyes.

"What, R," he said. "What's so important that you have to wake me up. Before the Desjardins hearing. At three o'clock. In the morning."

Grantaire didn't question how Enjolras had known what time it was without looking. He was uncanny that way. Once, during a long weekend in Lyon, Enjolras had successfully navigated their way back to their Airbnb using nothing but the position of the sun. To Grantaire, who frequently forgot whether it was morning or evening, who could—and did—get lost in the same outdoor market where they did their shopping every week, it was nothing short of a miracle.

"I wanted to talk," Grantaire said.

"Of course you did." Enjolras had still not moved. "About?"

What indeed. Not that he was likely to get a solid answer to the question he had in mind, but still. There would rarely be a better time to ask it. And since Enjolras was already annoyed, he had nothing to lose. He blurted out the question before he could stop himself, and the words hung horribly, awkwardly, above them in bed.

"Do you love me?"

Enjolras opened his eyes. Sat up. Stared at Grantaire.

"I'm sorry. Do I _what_?"

"Do you love me?" Grantaire repeated.

Enjolras closed his eyes and raked one hand backward through his hair. It was the physical equivalent of the word _fuck_ , and Grantaire knew it.

"Do I love you," he repeated. "R, it's three in the morning. You're still drunk. Go back to sleep."

Grantaire, too, hoisted himself to a seated position. He faced Enjolras with his most winning smile, the one he knew was a perennial source of apprehension and exasperation. The smile was a useful one. It could hide any number of other feelings. Annoyance, that the answer hadn't come more naturally. Terror, that the answer he wanted wasn't the true one. Disgust with himself, that he'd been pathetic enough even to ask.

But he'd done it now. There was no turning back.

They'd been together for three years, and he had never heard Enjolras say it. If he was going to hear it, it would be tonight, or it would be never.

"I'm not drunk," he said. "I'm asking you a question."

Enjolras sighed. His eyes did not quite meet Grantaire's. They drifted to a spot on the far wall, where a black smudge discolored the white paint. A scuff mark from when Grantaire had thrown a shoe across the room the year before, while cleaning out the closet with a bit too much élan. It wasn't fair, how beautiful Enjolras was. Grantaire would have woken him up four nights out of five just for the pleasure of watching him in the moonlight. Even when he was silent, struggling to form words, he seemed to Grantaire to be the most perfect man in the universe.

One who was never meant to love a mere mortal like him, no matter how long he'd stuck around.

"Do I love you?" Enjolras said, mostly to the stain on the wall. "What do you think?"

"I asked you first," Grantaire shot back. "Answer me, and I'll tell you what I think."

Enjolras sighed again. "We've been together for three years."

"Two," Grantaire corrected him.

"Two and ten months, R," Enjolras said. "The rule is to round up anything above point-five."

He'd said that without even pausing to think. As if he always had a running tally in the back of his mind, counting up the days he'd spent with Grantaire. Two years ten months together. One year two months in this apartment. Four years friends. As if he kept the record of it as precious in his mind as Grantaire did.

To cover the color he knew was rising in his face, Grantaire gave Enjolras a mock seated-bow. "My apologizes, Archimedes. Math was never my strong suit."

"I know that," Enjolras said. "I pay our rent, don't I?"

"That's still not answering the question." 

"How can you ask me if I love you, R? I sit through those God-awful house-hunting shows you love. Those _insufferable_ couples ready to spend six years' salary on a third home in Andorra, when half of France can't earn a living wage without working two, even three jobs. And do I complain?"

"Yes," Grantaire said fairly.

Enjolras closed his eyes in a silent prayer for strength. "And do I complain as much as I should?"

"No," Grantaire said. "You're a saint."

Either Enjolras was warming to the topic, or he was finally waking up. Either way, there was a new measure of energy to his voice, and he was beginning to speak with his hands, a sure sign that something resembling a diatribe was on the horizon. "I called your bank when a man in Portugal charged 800 euros' worth of lumber to your credit card," Enjolras went on. "I put up with your dog."

Now that was a bridge too far.

"Fuck off," Grantaire said. "You love Matisse."

Enjolras grinned. _Fuck, why was his smile perfect?_ He leaned over the bed toward the floor. Matisse, Grantaire's lazy, imperturbable spaniel, rolled over as if he'd sensed he was the subject of discussion. Enjolras scratched the dog's belly, and the sound of contented panting drifted up from the floor. Matisse always slept on Enjolras' side of the room, even though Grantaire had rescued the dog from the pound. He'd taken offense at first—man's best friend, how about a little loyalty—before realizing that he saw the dog's point. If Grantaire had been given the choice between himself and Enjolras, he wouldn't have come out on top.

"OK, I love Matisse," Enjolras consented. "But last week you used my toothbrush to paint the pubes on that nude you're doing."

"I needed the texture," Grantaire said.

Enjolras directed his eyes heavenward. At least once a week, they found themselves like this. One of them with their eyes rolled to the ceiling, praying for patience, wondering what it was about the other person that made their impossible levels of nonsense somehow tolerable. Grantaire knew exactly why he put up with Enjolras' quirks. Most days, he had no idea why Enjolras put up with his.

From the way Enjolras was speaking, it started to seem like that bewilderment was mutual.

"I fight with you more than anyone else I've ever met," Enjolras said. "You're stubborn and reckless and you've never taken a piece of advice in your life. You have no understanding of personal space. You spit in the face of individual property rights."

" _Vive la révolution_ ," Grantaire said. His heart was sinking, but he could hide that behind sarcasm, as he'd always done. " _Un pour tous—_ "

Enjolras shoved him in the shoulder. " _Et tous pour toi_."

As far as mottos went, it wasn't bad.

"You have a hereditary inability to be serious," Enjolras said. "You leave your dishes in the sink when we have a _dishwasher_ , right there, right _next to the sink_ —"

"So," Grantaire said, cutting him off. "So what you're saying is, you don't love me."

The silence that followed seemed to stretch for a hundred years. It hung between them, thick and sultry as the heavy air. Grantaire barely felt himself breathe.

And then Enjolras looked down at his knees, and he was silent for a long moment.

"That's not what I said," he murmured at last.

He laid a hand on Grantaire's shoulder, his touch cool against Grantaire's bare flesh. Grantaire shivered. How in hell did this man not sweat? Perhaps Joly would know. Grantaire had been hungover through an entire semester of physiology. Far easier to think about the fact that Enjolras might, through some freak of genetics, have evolved away his pores, rather than what might be waiting on the other half of Enjolras' sentence.

But Grantaire couldn't wait forever.

"What did you mean, then?"

"You drive me mad, Grantaire," Enjolras said. He looked up, now, his teeth worrying his bottom lip in what was perhaps the most charming gesture Grantaire had ever seen. "And yet I've been here in this bed with you, every night, for a year and two months. You tell me what that means."

He hadn't answered Grantaire's question. Perhaps he couldn't. Love was like that, sometimes. Ambiguous and nonverbal, hard to touch but easy to feel.

And Enjolras, at base, was not eloquent. Yes, there was no denying his rhetorical power in the classroom. The courtroom. The social justice editorials he wrote for _L'Opinion_ and _L'Humanité_ —a practice that seemed as compulsive in him as shooting up was in a heroin addict. When he was speaking about theory, politics, justice, the words poured out of him like he was possessed by the spirit of Robespierre, and there was nothing Grantaire or anyone else could do to stop him until he'd finished.

But ask the man to put his feelings into words, and you were left wondering if he'd ever strung together a sentence. It was like watching a four-year-old try to recite Rimbaud.

His answer tonight had been halting, awkward, circular to the extreme. Yet, by Enjolras' standards, it had been poetry.

Grantaire smiled. "So you love me," he said.

Enjolras shook his head. Clearly he was fully alive to the ridiculousness of the conversation, but in no mood to shut it down, either. "I guess so," he said.

This man. For God's sake. Why he had to make everything so difficult, the Lord Above only knew. "That's good to know," Grantaire said, and kissed him.

Enjolras wove a hand into Grantaire's hair and kissed him back. In that kiss, Grantaire wondered how he'd ever managed to doubt the existence of this love. It was present in everything Enjolras ever did, ever said, ever thought. His silences, his touch, the tenderness of his kiss, his breath, the beating of his heart. A love so deeply embedded, so much a part of who they both were, that it didn't need to be spoken, that words were redundant.

But. Sometimes.

Sometimes, you just wanted to hear it.

Enjolras gave Grantaire a small smile. He settled back into his side of the bed, curled up on his side again. Grantaire reached over and twined an arm around Enjolras' shoulders. With a sleepy sort of noise, Enjolras settled into the curve of Grantaire's arm. It was too hot outside to be so close, but Grantaire couldn't be bothered to care.

"Now," Enjolras said, already half-asleep. "If you wake me up again, R, I will kill you."


End file.
